Sylvia Plath

Rollie McKenna

Updated: March 23, 2009

On a cold February day in 1963, with her two small children upstairs in their room, Sylvia Plath put her head inside her kitchen oven and turned on the gas. In the wake of her violent death, reams of material have been published, analyzing her life and work, the most famous being "The Bell Jar." She has been dismissed as a case study in female neurosis and Freudian guilt, held up as a victim of a male-dominated society, enshrined as a tragic heroine (''a Dido, Phaedra or Medea,'' in Robert Lowell's words), explicated as a symbol of contemporary angst.

Plath, herself, of course, left us a remarkably contradictory gallery of self-portraits. While her correspondence with her mother (published in 1975 as ''Letters Home'') gave us a willfully sunny portrait of the young poet as an all-American girl, collecting admirers and beaus as swiftly as she piled up straight A's and honors, her journals created a darker, more troubling picture of a woman suspended between the violent emotions of jealousy and anger, a woman given to unforgiving nightmares, terrifying writing blocks and debilitating depressions. The poems (particularly the posthumously published ones in ''Ariel'' and subsequent volumes) were more lacerating still: here, she has become a vampire, a doomed Electra, a ''Lady Lazarus,'' eating ''men like air.'' Nearly a half-century after his mother died, Nicholas Hughes, 47, killed himself at his home in Alaska on March 16, 2009. — Michiko Kakutani

Highlights From the Archives

There is a big problem with making a movie about Sylvia Plath: it has to end with the main character sticking her head in the oven. Plath's death was merely senseless and unnecessary, even selfish, and it dooms her story -- however you choose to tell it -- to a poor and unsatisfying end.

Ted Hughes, the British poet who was known as much for his doomed marriage to the American poet Sylvia Plath as for his powerful, evocative poetry, replete with symbolism and bursting with dark images of the Devonshire countryside in which he lived, died Wednesday, his publisher said. He was 68.

No literary couple has been so mythologized as Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. In her own fierce, slashing poems, Plath dramatized herself as a terror-stricken victim, a doomed Electra, a ''Lady Lazarus,'' eating ''men like air,'' and she depicted her husband alternately as her ''savior,'' as her ''muse and god-creator'' and as her ''jailer'' and betrayer.

Sylvia Plath, a suicide at 30 in 1963, is the subject of several biographies - most recently, Anne Stevenson's ''Bitter Fame'' - and will doubtless be the subject of more. So complicated a character, it seems, invites continual reinterpretation.

July 26, 2013, Friday

Like Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion before her, Meg Wolitzer spent the summer as a guest editor at Mademoiselle. A look back at a time both heady with promise and tinged with the sadness of an era about to end.